Red Cross poised to cut back operations in Iraq

12.30pm

WASHINGTON - The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) was last night poised to cut back its operations in Iraq after its Baghdad offices were bombed by an ambulance in the first attack of its kind.

Other organisations providing medical aid have already reduced their staff.

While no decision has yet been made, officials at the ICRC's world headquarters in Geneva said the attack that killed two Iraqi employees and as many as 10 other people outside of the compound, had forced the organisation to hold a major review of its operation.

The suicide bomber was in an ambulance bearing the ICRC emblem.

"Such an attack is a major blow for us," said ICRC spokesman Florian Westphal.

"It's a big shock. It is obviously impossible to move onto a normal day's business, so we really have to step back and take stock. It's too early for us at the moment to say how this attack will impact on our activities. We will have a fairly clear idea within the next few days how we want to proceed."

The bombing - part of coordinated series of attacks that also targetted three police stations - is the first directed at the ICRC in more than 20 years during which it has operated in Iraq.

Since 1980 it has provided assistance during the Iran-Iraq war and the Gulf War.

But officials said they believed that the organisation, which has 39 expatriates and more than 700 Iraqi staff, had not been struck by accident.

"We are quite convinced now that we have been targeted as an institution. Our Iraqi staff is as much targeted and threatened by these kind of attacks as expatriate people," Pierre Gassmann, head of the ICRC's Baghdad office, told CNN.

"We are now thinking about what we can do in order to protect [ourselves] and see how we can continue working ... We have to think about all the implications that this attack will have and I guess that by Saturday this week we'll have taken decisions.."

Mr Gassmann said the organisation would not be seeking further military protection from the US so that it could be "distinguished" from the occupying forces.

"That is not an option because if you do militarise the Red Cross and the access to the Red Cross it will be extremely difficult for the people who are seeking our help ... to get access to the Red Cross," he said. "We want to avoid that."

The attack on the ICRC, which has been working in conjunction with the Iraqi Red Crescent on projects that included landmine education and the provision of water and sanitation equipment, sent a shockwave through the aid community and highlighted the dangers that even organisations not linked to the US forces face in Iraq.

Other aid groups - jittery since the August attack on the Baghdad offices of the UN which killed the special envoy, Sergio Vieira de Mello - are now scaling back their operations.

The Paris-based humanitarian group Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) said it would "scale down its current expatriate team of seven in Baghdad".

It said that by hitting the Red Cross, the attackers "aimed their explosives at the symbolic heart of neutral assistance".

The Greek branch of Doctors of the World, which continued working in Baghdad during the US-led assault, said it would probably pull out at least two of its three staff members as a result of the bombing.

The German government said it was considering the withdrawal of a four-member team of water-supply experts sent to Iraq in September.

Mr Westphal said that several weeks ago the ICRC had received "unspecified warnings that we may at one stage or another be the targets of an attack".

He said it was unclear which groups would wish to target the organisation. "[The warnings] were not in any way specific and it was really impossible to read too much into that except obviously that the situation is extremely difficult and dangerous," he said.

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